My shortcut is to look for people who get stuff done. During interviews I don’t ask technical questions or test the candidate but talk about accomplishments.

How many projects have they deployed to production and what problems does it solve?

A lot of developers work just during the development phase of a project and then jump to the next one. As a consequence they have no experience deliverying real life products and support systems in production.

I always look for people who finished things. Anyone can start or work on an ongoing project but just a few go through the whole process and have to maintain their stuff running.

I also talk about what the project does, in details, for the business. A good developer has to understand they are building something that is not just a piece of software but a tool to solve problems.

If they have these 2 things, I think we can work on the rest if needed.